Friday, December 4, 2015

At least this isn't the kind of “well
crap” I was saying at about this point in the Lufia Text Play.

I should still offer apologies for the
way I went about this, though.

See, part of the reason I did the end
of this game the way I did it is because I've got this bad habit of
waiting to actually play until after the 10 PM news is over, and I've
been trying to get to bed at a more regular time again. So, I
figured I'd do this in three parts, with the first half of the boss
rush one night, the second half another night, and then do the final
boss on a third night, tonight. My reasoning was that if I just
tried to muscle through and do it all in one sitting, as I could very
easily have, if I'd wanted to and had known how the weather was going
to be this week, I'd have hit a snag, gotten pissy about it and wound
up ruining this for everybody. It turns out that might not have been
necessary, even with the way my luck tends to run.

All this takes us to the top floor of
Doom Castle, where the Dark King is waiting for us. To get into his
chamber, there's a statue of a knight we have to talk to. It says
that the Crystals are giving Ben and Phoebe their power because these
two are the Knights of Legend. That's not the exact wording, but it
gets the point across. They open the way forward, and also grant
access to the last four chests in the game. These have Arrows for
Phoebe, Cure potions, Heal potions, and Seeds. They all contain
either 25 or enough to max out the inventory, whichever is less.

When we go confront the Dark King, he
tells us that the world's over and we're going to serve him because
the prophecy the game's story is based on was just a bunch of
bullshit that he'd come up with. Ben tells him to go fuck himself,
which sets off the final battle.

I'd say it was a fairly standard final
battle if it wasn't as simplified as it was. It seems fairly obvious
to me that we're meant to use the crazy powerful spells we've got on
the Dark King, so for most of the battle, I was just spamming Ben's
Flare spell and Phoebe's White spell. I did heal when needed, of
course, because it's usually necessary in these final battles.

Thing is, though, that depending on how
lucky one is when one sits down to play, the final boss can be either
easy or hard. It's like this for every game there is, regardless of
title or genre. I say that because hard for Mystic Quest is what
would have been not so bad for Final Fantasy 4, and a cake walk
compared to Kefka at the end of FF6. And I got lucky enough to have
this be an easy fight, which means that it was really easy. The Dark
King only managed to kill Phoebe once, and getting him to cycle
through his four forms was no problem.

When the fight starts, the Dark King
looks like a regular guy, but with green skin. His second form is
with six arms, all equipped with a different weapon. The third form
is a giant spider, a la Giant
Spider Invasion. The final form is the spider, but with the skin
and exoskeleton melted off the legs.

By the time we got to that last one,
I'd used all of Ben's charges for his high level spells and was using
him to keep the heroes healed up. Phoebe still had a couple charges
left for her White spell, so I kept her on that. Once I got
everybody healed up with Ben, I remembered that I'd read somewhere
that the Dark King can be hurt with the Cure spell, too, but it only
works once. The only reason I can think of that last bit being
important is if you have to make him cycle through all four forms to
win, because if I read the screen right, using Cure on him did some
insane about of damage, like in the area of 30,000 points of damage
insane. I would think that would be enough to one-shot him
otherwise.

When the Dark King bites it, the Old
Guy shows up and turns into another crystal, the Crystal of Light,
and says we won because there's always hope as long as we're willing
to hold onto it.

From there, Ben and Phoebe go around
the world to see how everybody's doing. Everything
is Awesome now that the Dark King is gone, and everybody's happy
that Ben's decided to get more adventure in his life. Captain Mac is
so much so that he lets Ben take his boat to go looking for it.
After a few last stops, most of the allies meet Ben and Phoebe at the
dock so Ben can set out looking for that adventure he wants. Phoebe
leaves the party and joins the others in wishing him luck in his
adventures. Just before the end credits roll, Tristam shows up on
the boat and says he's coming along regardless of if Ben likes it
because he's got a permanent boner for adventure.

I've got enough other thoughts to talk
about to fill as much space as this issue already has, but I'm going
to save most of them for the epilogue. The one I'm going to bring up
here is that as I read the credits this time around, I thought of
something I really hadn't until just now. A lot of the people who
worked on this game also worked on Final Fantasy IV and VI, because I
recognized the names from the credits to those other games. From
that, I can assume that they worked on Final Fantasy V as well, as it
came out in Japan at the same time this was coming out here. Makes
me wonder if this game wasn't as easy to make as it was to play, in
general. But I'll get to that a little more in the epilogue.